Eve and Adam

– 29 –

“So,” Aislin says after we’ve tied off the boat at Fisherman’s Wharf. “Now what?”

“My plan never really went any further than this,” I admit.

The wharf’s asleep, but in a few hours the boats will start to come in. Then the early bird tourists will show up, looking for a latte and a croissant.

For now, it’s a fog-wreathed ghost town of seafood restaurants and closed knickknack shops. The tour boats and ferries rock and creak at the piers. The stainless steel tables, which will soon be piled with crabs and fish on beds of crushed ice, are covered with canvas tarps.

A lone homeless guy pushes a heavy-laden Safeway cart, pauses to look into a trash can, and ignores us. A police car drives by and the fog swirls around the car. The cop ignores us, too.

Eve and Aislin look at me. I shrug. “Guys, I never planned to have two girls with me.”

“Well, that’s typical,” Aislin drawls. “Men always want two girls, but do they take the time to plan? No.”

“We need to get the data safely uploaded somehow,” I say. “Once it’s all over YouTube and Imgur.com, with links at Reddit, we’ll be safe.”

“Then what happens?” Eve asks.

I clear my throat, force myself to look her in the eyes. “Then the FBI and the FDA and a bunch of other agencies find out about it and move in.”

“Move in.” It’s not a question, just a statement.

“We can go to my house,” Aislin says doubtfully.

Eve shakes her head. “First place my mother will look.”

“Where’s the last place she’ll look?” I ask.

Eve considers the question carefully. I see that she’s thought of something. The idea makes her frown. She’s not sure.

“I know a place,” she says finally. “Follow me.”

It’s a bit of a walk along the Embarcadero, the boulevard that follows the waterfront around the northeastern tip of the peninsula. On our left are the massive pier warehouses. Many have been turned into tourist destinations. Some are more rough and ready. On our right are the streetcar tracks, and beyond them, almost wholly swallowed up by the fog, lie the hills and the tall buildings of San Francisco.

I can just make out the top third of Coit Tower, a concrete art deco structure, poking out of the fog. It was built with money left by a woman named Lillie Coit, a gambling, cigar-smoking, fire department groupie who shaved her head to pass as a man back in the twenties when that kind of thing would get you in trouble—even in San Francisco. I’ve always liked her story.

I like rebels.

We turn off the Embarcadero, heading down the side of the least-rehabbed warehouse. It extends out over the water, a shambling, corrugated tin-walled bit of history. There’s a small door at the end. Its padlock is crusted with spiderwebs and rust.

Eve stops. With a tentative finger, she touches the lock.

“I might be able to find something to break the lock,” I say.

Eve doesn’t answer. She takes a deep breath, goes to the railing over the water, and kneels, fumbling until she finds a length of rotting, seaweed-tangled rope. She pulls it up.

There’s a bobbing float on the end, even slimier than the rope. The float has a screw-off top that Eve isn’t quite strong enough to manage. It’s all I can do to budge the top. It doesn’t want to open up. But at last it gives and inside there’s a key.

Eve tries it. It works. She pushes the door inward and Aislin and I step in after her, batting aside cobwebs.

Eve finds a switch. A single lightbulb high overhead barely touches the shadows. We’re in a big, open space, but not an empty space. Huge shapes rear up over us like creatures frozen in time.

The lightbulb pops and goes out. We all jump.

Eve takes out her phone and uses the light from it to locate a long table. It’s a workbench, really, just some plywood nailed together. She rummages in a drawer and pulls out a package, ripping it open with her teeth. I hear a muted crack.

It’s a glow stick. Blue light. A second glows green.

The light isn’t much better, but my eyes adjust and I see that shapes scattered through the room are abstract statues of some kind. There are forms from nature—trees, I think, flowers, even clouds—but most of the sculptures resemble animals. Next to me, rendered in smooth, white stone, is the suggestion of a ten-foot-tall bear. Near Eve I can make out a tiger in mid-leap—or maybe it’s a lion. No, it definitely feels like a tiger to me.

There must be seven or eight of these strange animal shapes. None of them look precisely like anything, but they all manage to tell you what they might be, could be.

“I haven’t been here in a long time. Not since he died,” Eve says. She sits on the floor, browsing through a stack of canvases leaning against a wall like tumbled dominoes.

I’m about to ask who she means, but it’s obvious Aislin knows. She puts her hand on Eve’s arm and says, “I wish I’d known your dad.”

“Your dad was a sculptor?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Eve says, and even that single word comes out shaky with emotion. “He did some painting and drawing, too. But mostly he sculpted.”

I find the package of glow sticks. I snap one—it’s blue, too—and use it to explore the room. There is something moving about this place. Something sacred, somehow.

“Won’t your mother know you’ll come here?” I call back to Eve from behind something that must be a hawk or an eagle. It’s hanging from the rafters by chains, and it doesn’t look happy about being chained.

“My mom doesn’t remember he was ever alive,” Eve says.

“How did he die?”

“Car accident in Tiburon. I was eleven.”

My heart pulls a lurch. “Where?”

Tiburon.

Eve’s seventeen.

I do the math.

She shrugs: It’s an unimportant detail. “Paradise Road, the back road to Tiburon. It’s a twisty, two-lane… well, you know that.”

Yes. I know.

Pieces fall into place. Pieces I never suspected.

My history with Eve goes much further and deeper than I know.

So that’s why Terra Spiker took me in: guilt.

Her husband killed my parents.

Six years ago on a foggy night, someone tried to pass my parents’ car. The driver must have seen oncoming traffic, because he suddenly swerved back and hit my parents, knocking their car over the side of the embankment.

The two cars crashed down through trees and rock, spraying dirt in every direction, the passengers smashing again and again against the dashboards and the steering wheels and roofs until they were all dead.

At least, that’s how I see it sometimes, in my nightmares.

There was no way to know if the guy trying to pass my parents was drunk. The vehicles caught fire and burned for hours before anyone noticed and called 911. They identified my parents from dental records.

Terra never said a word. No one did. Maybe I would have pieced things together, if I’d read the accident reports, done some digging.

But I didn’t want to know anything. One moment, my parents were alive. The next, they were gone.

I shut down. Shut off the world.

“That’s a dangerous road,” I say.

Then I find some other part of the room to be in.

I pace by one of the grimy windows, thinking things through. All I have to do is make everything on the flash drive public. Once that’s done, we’re home safe.

Just one problem: We’re stuck in a big warehouse full of massive statues and no Wi-Fi. There’s no Internet of any kind.

Our phones all have connections, of course, but I have no way to get the files from the flash drive to the phone. I need a computer. A somewhat old-fashioned one, in fact, so that I can plug into a USB, then upload the files.

Damn.

I’m going to need a public library or a FedEx office or something. But it’s 4:30 in the morning.

Nothing to do but sleep.

I’m weary. The adrenaline’s worn off. I still feel bruised and battered, although I’m much better off than I should be. Poor Aislin’s probably still feeling a lot worse.

“I guess we should try to sleep,” I say.

There’s a sagging couch, a cot, and a chair in one corner. A TV, too. I switch it on, but while someone is paying the electricity bill, no one has paid cable. I fiddle around a bit and get the local broadcast channels. There’s nothing on, but the cold light is comforting, somehow.

“I’ve got the chair,” Aislin says. “And I also have the couch. You two will have to share the cot. Oh, and I’m a very heavy sleeper. You guys could make all kinds of noise and I wouldn’t even notice.”

“Cute,” Eve says. “I’ll take the chair. I’m the smallest.”

I stretch out on the couch. A couple of hours ago I was kissing Eve. I was sure I was madly in love with her.

I am madly in love with her.

But. But something’s changed. I’m here in the studio of the man who killed my parents. Eve’s father. Terra Spiker’s husband.

Terra, who’s done horrible things. To Eve, to me, to a whole lot of others.

There’s too much history. There are way too many complications.

What did I think was going to happen after I revealed the truth? This isn’t exactly a happily-ever-after kind of setup.

“I can’t sleep,” Eve says softly. I’m not sure if she’s talking to Aislin or to me. To anyone. “I keep seeing… the girl.”

No one asks who she means. We know.

“I wish you’d never shown me,” Eve says, and now I’m sure she’s talking to me.

I sit up on my elbows. “So you could live in blissful ignorance?” I ask. “I did you a favor, Eve.”

“A favor?”

“She’s your mother. You have a right to know. An obligation.”

“Just because I’m her daughter doesn’t make me responsible for what she’s done,” Eve says. “Are you responsible for your parents?”

I let it sit, and a moment later I hear her sharp intake of breath. “Oh, God, I’m sorry, Solo. I forgot. I’m so tired, I don’t know what I’m saying anymore.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“It’s just, she’s my mother. You think you know someone, know what someone’s capable of, and then—”

“Yeah, life’s full of surprises,” I say. I lie back, exhale loudly.

Then I rest the crook of my elbow on my eyes and pretend to fall asleep.